THE EU blocked exports of some Covid-19 vaccines made on the continent today amid a row with pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca over supply.

European Commisson executive vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis said the bloc would to restrict exports of some vaccines, including the Pfizer/Biontech jab, at a Brussels press conference.

It came soon after the EU staked a claim to Oxford-AstraZeneca doses made in Britain.

The Commission published a heavily redacted contract with AstraZeneca in its claim that the pharma company is reneging on a deal to supply a Covid-19 vaccine to EU nations.

Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU’s contract signed in August 2020 contained “binding orders” for the vaccine. 

The EU is concerned that doses meant for its member states may have been diverted to Britain from an AstraZeneca plant on the continent. The EU also wants doses manufactured in two British factories to be made available to EU citizens.

But AstraZeneca chief executive Pascal Soriot has said that the contract obliged the firm to make its “best effort” to meet EU demand without a specific timetable; a claim that the EU disputes.

The company has said that its contract with Britain — signed in May 2020, three months after production had already started — prevented it meeting the EU’s demands.

EU sources say they now expect to get only a quarter of a planned 100 million vaccines by March, mainly due to factory issues on the continent.

Convener of the Leave, Fight, Transform (LeFT) Campaign Alex Gordon said that “the EU’s treaty-bound structures” exposed by the pandemic were “failing the peoples of Europe.”

Communist Party of Britain general secretary Rob Griffiths warned against Britain and other countries being penalised by EU sanctions before the export ban was announced.

He said the commission had shown “cumbersome control-freakery” in securing doses compared with the “relatively effective work done in Britain by scientists, medical authorities and government.”

Mr Griffiths added that more should have been done through the World Health Organisation to “ensure low-cost vaccines to people everywhere on the basis of their vulnerability.”

Global Justice Now director Nick Dearden called for patents to be suspended to remove “artificial limits” in supply.

He added: “It’s frankly disgusting that very healthy young people in wealthy countries are being put ahead of desperately vulnerable people in lower-income countries.”

It comes as a new coronavirus vaccine, manufactured by Novavax, has been shown to be 89 per cent effective in large-scale trials in Britain.